Storage Migration¶
Warning
Beginning at 3pm on Monday, June 21, 2021, we will be migrating all users home directories to new file servers. We have compiled this FAQ to help answer questions about what to expect. This will impact all managed desktops and servers that currently mount your home directory under /h1/<uid> or /h2/<uid>. It is important to note your home directory will be changing to /oden/<uid>. Before the maintenace begins, it is strongly suggested you save any work and logout of your desktops or shell sessions and stop any processes you may have running. Failure to do this could result in loss of data that may be unrecoverable.
Migration of NFS services¶
In mid June 2021, Sysnet will begin the process of bringing new NFS storage online and begin to migrate users home directories and everything under /org. This will impact all desktops and servers the Sysnet team manages.
How to protect your data¶
As mentioned previously, it is strongly suggested you logout of your desktop or shell session(s) and leave the desktop running. Shutting down the system won’t allow it to receive the critical update needed for the migration and can cause issues later. Once the update has been pushed out to all desktops, reboots will be issued across all systems that are online.
Am I impacted?¶
All servers and desktops managed by Sysnet will be impacted. If your
home directory is prefixed with /h1 or /h2, this migration
will impact you.
Who is not impacted¶
Clusters, Mac and Windows desktops, unmanaged desktops are not impacted. If you’re unsure, please send a help request to RT.
How am I impacted by this change?¶
We are making signficant changes on how our managed systems mount
remote shares. Your home directory will now be prefixed with
/oden/ and no longer h1 or h2. This change can and
will impact scripts where you hard code your home directory path.
Best practice going forward is to use the tilde expansion, ~, or
$HOME environment variable.
Bash, Zsh, Csh, Tcsh¶
Inspect your initialization script(s) (.bashrc, .cshrc, .zshrc) for any occurences of your home directory to make sure they are not hard coded.
Anaconda3¶
If you’re an Anaconda3 user, you should already be using local scratch
storage, /workspace, for your virtual instance. Inspect your
pkgs_dirs and envs_dirs.
Subversion and Git¶
There may no change to your working copies, however, if you do have your own local repository in your home directory, it could be impacted.
Desktop environments¶
Desktop enviornments like Gnome, Cinnamon, or Xfce should not be an issue. There are some cases where Gnome (default desktop manager for Ubuntu) could be problematic and you may not be able to login to the console.
Will /org/ change?¶
Everything under /org should not be impacted, those paths are not changing.
What about module commands?¶
No, not at this time. We will leave the module system on the old file server and move them at a later date.
Will login1.oden.utexas.edu be impacted¶
Yes. Any active login sessions on login1 will be impacted. Before the migration, we will patch the system and restart after the migration begins.
Why the change to /oden/<uid>?¶
The separate file system declarations, h1 and h2, have been around for
13 years. At one time we had separate file servers for each file
system to help distribute the load. Maintaining multiple servers is
costly. For the last 6 years, we have been running a single server
with multiple file systems with very little impact on server load and
client response. Bringing the home directories under a single file
system makes it easier to administer. We decided not to use /home
because it is reserved for local accounts on the system. You can read
more about our Hardware setup.
Migration steps¶
At 3pm, push out changes to systems
Shutdown NFS services on old file server
Syncronize data from old server to new server
Update LDAP
Issue reboots across netgroups
Verify changes on systems and test mounts